A collection of thoughts, ramblings and experience of making technology work for me. It may include some further diversions.

Firefox "Apply Update" fails on Windows

Mozilla Firefox since version 6.0 (thru 6.0.1 to 6.0.2) has not been installing software updates properly for me on a Windows 7 machine via the usual 'Help > About Firefox > Apply Updates' command. Firefox always shows the 'Apply Update' button and fails to upgrade or check for new updates. Firefox does close and attempt to update eventually restarting without update occurring and the only way I have found to update is to manually install the latest version over the top. However this manual workaround hasn't corrected the embedded Firefox update functionality. Read on for the solution that worked for me...From Mozilla "A Software Update Failed error can occur on systems with limited user accounts (bug 374900, bug 383518) or when the Mozilla files to be updated are in use (bug 340535, bug 466778)." Solution 1 (This didn't work for me)Run Firefox with elevated user privilegesand apply updates:

Type "firefox" (without the quotes) and right-click on the "Mozilla Firefox" entry that appears

Select "Run as Administrator" and "Continue" if the User Account Control dialog comes up

Apply updates within Firefox.

Solution 2 (This did work for me)Another possible solution is to reset the Software Update feature by ending all Firefox processes and then removing "active-update.xml", "updates.xml" and the "updates" folder from the appropriate folder locations:

Remove the files in the updates and updates\0 folder. You may need to delete active-update.xml and updates.xml as well if present.